Monumental Art Collection

M-City

The mural recalls the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. Like Waras’s other work, it was created with the aid of a stencil. The technique allows work to be created very quickly on walls but is preceded by the painstaking work of cutting out the stencil in the studio. After consultations with residents, the initial plan for a plane was replaced by an airship. This is not the first airship in Zaspa. A few hundred metres further along today’s Hynka Street, the famous Graf Zeppelin landed near the first airfield in 1932, as had the SL-1 in 1913, a vessel built by Johann Schütte, professor at the Technische Hochschule, or the present Technical University of Gdańsk.

Uwolnić Gwiazdę

Before the M-City mural was created, the same wall became the scene of an unusual event. In the winter night of 1984, Marek Czachor and Zbigniew Mielewczyk called for freedom of Andrzej Gwiazda on the very same wall. Four floor tall inscription "Free Gwiazda" was created in a few minutes using a brush bench and sweepings. Zbigniew Mielewczyk, who was responsible for the word "Gwiazda", was not equipped with right tools, which resulted in a lower quality of the right side of the wall. The next day, the firefighters called by the government officials to clean the wall, painted it over in such a way that it became easy to read even at night as the first letters were left untouched due to a low boom. The inscription was finally painted over, but got permanently inscribed in the local memory of Zaspa.

Artist

Mariusz Waras born 1978 in Gdynia. A graphic artist, outdoor painter, traveller, amateur architect. Graduated from the Department of Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk where he is currently assistant lecturer in Prof. Jerzy Ostrogórski's painting studio. The author of the m-city project including several hundred murals. His work focuses on urban space. His murals may be seen in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bolzano, London and Prague, as well as in art galleries, including individual exhibitions at the Arsenal in Poznań (2005) and the CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk (2006). He is also a curator of the 238x504 hoarding gallery in Gdynia as well as an archivist / collector of Polish street art. Freelance graphic artist, frequently awarded in various contests.